Wait, is Biblical higher criticism just mindless speculation based on writing styles? Is there any extra-textual evidence that a Q source or a Johannine community or any of this other stuff ever existed?
Wait, is Biblical higher criticism just mindless speculation based on writing styles?
No. It's all speculation that gets presented with a veneer of "science." Bart Ehrman goes as far as to claim none of the Apostles thought Jesus was divine by essentially cherry picking Apostolic authorship of all the earliest church documents and moving rates around "just so," and still has a terribly unconvincing argument, but it gets presented in the secular Bible studies space as "great scholarship," even though it is well known that he is a disenchanted Evangelical who doesn't like Christianity, calls it "a great source of mental anguish," and has dedicated his life to "debunking" the Bible because he doesn't think people should be Christian. But remember, secular thinkers do not have agendas the way Catholics or Protestants do, they just stick to facts!
Yep it's all bullshit just waiting for a biblically educated protestant student to enter his undergrad and cause the whole house of cards to collapse
It can't collapse because it isn't built on anything. It's just supposition and hypothesis.
From the late 1800s to the 1970s the field KNEW the israeli canon was closed at the Council of Jamnia. Now everyone agrees this is false.
What happened? Did we dig up new archeological evidence? Find new sources?
No, some new arguments got popular, picked up steam, and suddenly became "scholarly opinion," such that people felt comfortable throwing pure supposition out as a sort of fact.
The truth is that there is no way to know who wrote what, but you can't make book sales or push religious or atheist narratives on "honestly, no one knows," so you get a scam field instead.
Notice that Catholic sources are as impeccably cited and researched as Prot ones, which are as well argued and cited as atheist ones, and yet they all claim very different things. The only people whose claims can be easily dismissed are the "the Bible is perfect," Evangelicals. Erhman is butthurt because his education debunked his fundy views, but the stuff he puts on "Misquoting Jesus," as sort of conspiratorial is literally in any Catholic, Orthodox, or mainline Protestant study Bible. They all have notes about multiple authorities. Not everyone is a KJV only fundy.
This is such cope, Jabneh was accepted as deciding Chronicles and Song of Songs was canon, *but that's it*, and it was that wider understanding of setting a canon down for the whole Heeby Bible that was dismissed, *because there was no evidence that went that far*.
How is it cope? In their forwards and afterwards this entire field absolutely does say "yeah, absolutely no way to know for sure or even with 70% confidence if what I'm about to say is true, but lets not let that get in the way of our "scholarship."
For instance, it's literally fricking impossible to know if Peter wrote I Peter but they opine on it anyhow and make theories based off these unsupportable claims one way or the other.
>For instance, it's literally fricking impossible to know if Peter wrote I Peter
Like many of the other epistles, it tells you who wrote it and to whom it was addressed. If someone is telling you it's impossible to know, then they're lying or they're dishonest and they think they're clever for playing semantics games and changing definitions as these progressive apostate perverts always do.
So the Gospel of James and Apocryphon of John were written by Apostles because they say they were?
The problem with this line is that tons of obviously fake Gnostic works and other non-canonical works are claimed to be written by Apostles and some were fairly widely accepted for a time too.
The Gnostic Gospels were known to be forgeries.
Compare that to Mark, for example, who was been unanymously accepted to have been written by Mark for 1,800 years
And notice that there would be no point in falsely claiming authorship to Mark. Of course he is a great saint, but if you wanted to improve the pedigree by assigning an author, it would make more sense to pick someone more famous. One of the 12 Apostles, Paul, Barnabas, Mary Magdalene, James.
>Compare that to Mark, for example, who was been unanymously accepted to have been written by Mark for 1,800
This does not, in any way, prove authenticity. Concensus nor duration does not equate to truth.
It is a pretty strong evidence.
If there has never been any controversy over who wrote it but rather it has been attested in an unanimous way to have been written by someone, chances are he is the author.
Anonymous Gospel authorship arguments are the same arguments on why Shakespearean texts were written by Oxford, Bacon or whatever. They are ridiculous and should be treated as ridiculous.
>This does not, in any way, prove authenticity.
Where a document is universally accepted as the authentic Gospel of Mark, in East and West, from the very beginning and without exception across the centuries, then, yes, that *does* prove the document is authentic to the extent that the authenticity of any ancient document can ever be proven or established.
>Concensus nor duration does not equate to truth.
Now, wrt truth, as such, there is room to attack the truth of specific claims made within the document, e.g., an historian could cite evidence on the basis of which he might aver that Mark erred in making a particular claim or assertion.
I'm not
by the way
But the claims that the Gospels were written anonymously with zero evidence but only with fanfictions about a secret source without any kind of evidence of it ever existing is not acceptable.
I think a distinction that would help his arguments would be to say that even if the Gospels were written by Jesus’ apostles themselves, matched each other perfectly and laid out the exact modern beliefs of mainstream Christianity, that wouldn’t make it any more true.
>dedicated his life to "debunking" the Bible because he doesn't think people should be Christian
Thats simply not true
No.
Basically, for 1800 years there was no doubt on who wrote the Gospels. All sources, all traditions, all fragments (with the parts where authorship is mentioned) agree the traditional Authors wrote it
Did anyone ever attempt this for the Quran?
Search up the revisionist school of Islam
I only skimmed the wiki article but very interesting nevertheless. It's also promising that none involved have been beheaded so far, apparently
There’s the Aramaic hypothesis (that the entire Quran was originally an Aramaic prayer book and that obscure passages make sense in this light). I don’t know how seriously this is taken by scholars
Higher biblical criticism is probably one of the worst areas in academia.
I recently saw one of them argue that the New Testament didn't condemn sodomy, by trying to shift the meaning of the term.
Paul went out of his way to create a new term to show he doesn't support men sleeping with men. The early Christians and the Church Fathers understood it this way.
But then, someone 2000 years after the letter was written, who didn't natively speak the language twisted the words to claim it didn't mean that.
Sex with Kpoppers
Licking kpoppers after a hard day training.
please go back to IQfy
The Holy Bible is the infallible, inerrant, inspired word of God. Just make sure you're not using one of the counterfeits which introduce errors or which were modified (at least 10%) to get a copyright for the love of money. Sad thing is people who claim to follow Christ and love the truth don't see a problem with rat poison bibles that destroy the faith of many and undermine the gospel or attack God directly.
If you notice something about those "critics", they all hate a specific Bible and will jump at the chance to slander anyone who likes that Bible, but they're fine with saying all the other still-being-published bibles are the same (even when they're not and that's a blatant lie, or when they all introduce errors/contradictions). And they usually never used that specific Bible or they always had a problem with it and that's why they jumped to some apostate bible that makes Jesus a sinner or gives Lucifer titles reserved for Jesus Christ (and if you're unaware, there are people who actually think Lucifer and Jesus are the same being because of these modernist perversions of the Holy Bible). At best, they're lukewarm and will be spewed out, no sense relying on such people for any sort of education especially when they prove themselves liars or when they call God a liar by the counterfeit bibles they endorse.
>The Holy Bible is the infallible, inerrant, inspired word of God.
The New Testament too?
That's a stupid question.
Im questioning a stupid person.
1/10
>>>/b/
The Bible was written over the course of about 1000 years. Obviously by different authors. That's why the different sections are called "books". It's an anthology of books centered around the historical happenings of a religion's believers. The beginning of the Old testament, although it's likely to be the most fictitious part of the Bible (that and the absolute end of it when you get to the schizo-doomer end-of-the-world books), is the closest you will get to "God's Words" as it was intended to be interpreted by at least some of the authors of the Bible.
IDK. It's quite frustrating. You can't get a translation of the Glossa Ordinaria for more than a few books but you can get endless theorizing about how the real israeli was just like, totally a socialist reformer, or a trans activist, or whatever.
Modern commentaries don't tend to even add things that are particularly helpful. They are either hair brained theories, a bunch of dry, historical data, or Evangelical polemics (e.g. the ESV study Bible, which is downright disingenuous at times).
Ancient and Medieval commentaries are vastly superior on average. Thankfully, we have some really good compilations of those, like the Ancient Christian Commentaries on Scripture (excellent). There is a similar medieval compilation but they don't have many books finished yet, and then the Song of Songs has a good translation of the glosses (good stuff).
I don't even dislike all modern commentaries. I can appreciate a lot of stuff in Leon Kass' books on Genesis and Exodus even though they are very secular and israeli. But what I don't appreciate is hair brained theories or people presenting the fact that the Bible evolved over a long period as some sort of shocking conspiracy that has been covered up, even though disagreement on the Canon and authorship is all over the Church Father's debates.
But I wish people interested in the Bible would do something more useful, like create a similar sort of commentary compilation for post schism Greek saint's commentaries. I would be very interested in that. Instead the focus is on if some comma or tense of a verb was x or y.